Bradley, James. Flyboys; a true story of courage.

BRADLEY, James. Flyboys; a true story of courage. Little Brown, Back Bay. 404p. illus. notes. bibliog. index. c2003. 0-316-15943-3. $14.95. SA

The wartime exploits of George Herbert Walker Bush are well known. The youngest pilot in the Navy at the time, flying the burly Grumman TBF Avenger torpedo bomber, Bush had an exciting but unremarkable war up until the day when his squadron bombed an enemy stronghold and the young man's luck ran out. His plane riddled with flak and burning fiercely with two dead crewmen in the back, Bush had to bail out into enemy waters. At that, he was lucky. This book is the tale of nine Navy airmen whose planes were shot down over Chichi Jima that day. Eight of them were soon captured, and suffered unimaginably before they were barbarously executed. An American submarine fished the ninth from the sea, and he lived to become the 41st president of the United States.

Bradley revisits this tale of what happened in one day in 1945. Without cringing, he confronts the reader with war as it sometimes can be. While the Japanese brutality toward their prisoners is boldly presented, the book is not a polemic against the island's defenders. Instead, Bradley presents the tragedies as he sees them; both sides fight fiercely, average people do their jobs with unselfconscious bravery, and young people die. Bradley knows something about battlefield bravery. His father was one of the six Marines who raised the flag on Iwo Jima, and he wrote about it in the best-selling Flags of our Fathers (Bantam, 2001). Meanwhile, even as the historic episode was being photographed for posterity, the distressing events were taking place on nearby Chichi Jima.

Unfortunately, however, Flyboys also has some inherent shortcomings. Retelling historical events through the eyes of its characters inevitably means inventing dialog and putting thoughts into the heads of people long dead. This technique, now called "literary nonfiction," is becoming ever more popular among writers today. The author's motives are probably pure, but inevitably he must portray their most intimate behavior as he himself sees it. This book is also peppered with small technical errors--even the term Flyboy is mildly disparaging--that greater familiarity with the subject would have prevented. That said, the book remains a vivid and exciting lesson of one episode in WW II. Raymond Puffer, Ph.D, Historian, Edwards AFB, Lancaster, CA

S--Recommended for senior high school students.

A--Recommended for advanced students and adults. This code will help librarians and teachers working in high schools where there are honors and advanced placement students. This also will help extend KLIATT's usefulness in public libraries.